The present article is about deficient markets and a new approach to policy intervention that responds to them. This approach, in turn, is meant to underpin the broader institutionalist negotiated-economy conception. The paper proceeds from a typical market-based economic problem (such as job losses, or income decreases), which it interprets as a lock-in (or blockage) of agents in a typical social situation. In an evolutionary process entailing social learning, interactive private agents may form social institutions of cooperation to overcome such lock-ins. This is, at least, a widely shared “new evolutionary” expectation. This process, however, turns out to be highly fragile and time-consuming, Therefore, a specific type of public policy intervention is called for to stabilize and accelerate the learning process of the private agents.
